Jihad

When the European colonial powers arrived in several Islamic countries in the nineteenth century, resistance against them involved the jihad and usually failed. When successful resistance eventually emerged, it was through secular, nationalist ideologies. Meanwhile Muslim thinkers in several countries took a new look at the jihad, seeking to make it compatible with what they saw as progress and modernity. A new body of juridical work defined the jihad as defensive warfare, while an "Islamic law of nations" presented the eighth-century al-Shaybani (750–803 or 805), an Islamic jurist who wrote a book of the law of war, on a par with the seventeenth-century Grotius. In this way the relations of Islamic and non-Islamic states became placed firmly on a basis of peace.